Release Notes for Dragon Medical SpeechKit 2021.4 (Browser edition 4.0 R1)

New in version 2021.4 (4.0 R1)

• Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Silverlight are no longer supported. Microsoft ended support for Silverlight in October 2021. Dragon Medical SpeechKit supports Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari on desktop operating systems. For specific version numbers, see System requirements below. [HCPLAT-1751]
• The Dragon Medical SpeechKit end user help is now only available in the personalization & help window when using a speech-enabled application. It is no longer available as a URL. [DNB-38606]

Important information

• Web browsers on mobile operating systems are not supported.
• Dragon Medical SpeechKit (Browser edition) requires HTTPS with an SSL/TLS certificate bound to the web server.
• Dragon Medical SpeechKit 2021.4 (Browser edition) is compatible with Dragon Medical Server 3.6 Release 2, 2020.x or 2021.x.
• Dragon Medical Server 2021.4 is compatible with client versions 2020.x and 2021.x.
• Filtering auto-texts (defining filters to deactivate auto-texts selectively) is deprecated and will no longer work.
• Do not change or hide Browser edition GUI elements. Changing or hiding these elements risks the stability and compatibility of the product; Nuance cannot provide support for such integrations.
• Do not embed or float the speech bar dynamically.
• Web browser debugging consoles or debugging proxies (for example, Fiddler) cannot be used with speech recognition. The performance impact incurred by such infrastructure leads to unreliable speech recognition.

Supported edit controls

• All HTML <input> and <textarea> controls.
• CKEditor instances.

With CKEditor 5, only the inline editor is supported.

In CKEditor, new lines do not work as expected; see known issues below.

• <div> elements that have the HTML5 contenteditable attribute set to true.

Using HTML5 content-editable elements

You can speech-enable <div> elements by adding the HTML5 contenteditable attribute.

Because the mapping of GUI text and selection points to HTML code is ambiguous, Dragon Medical SpeechKit needs to remove sources of ambiguity to ensure that recognized text is not inserted in an unexpected location.

During the initialization of speech-enabled edit controls, when you call NUSA_initialize(), NUSA_initializeVuiForm() or NUSA_reinitializeVuiForm(), the HTML content of contenteditable elements is normalized as follows:

• All comments are removed from the HTML content.
• All whitespace that is not displayed on the control's GUI is removed from the HTML content.
• Empty paragraphs (that the user cannot see or navigate to) are removed.

HTML element handling in a content-editable <div>

When speech-enabling a content-editable <div>, Dragon Medical SpeechKit interprets the HTML content as a sequence of plain text.

The following HTML elements have limited support when they occur in this text:

• <br>
• <p>
• <div>
• <h1-6>
• <span>
• <img>
• Inline text-formatting elements such as <b>, <i>, <strong>

These elements do not prevent speech recognition functionality, but when the user deletes or overwrites text within the content-editable <div>, these elements can also be deleted/overwritten along with any style attributes applied to them. When this occurs, voice commands such as undo that can restore deleted text but cannot restore deleted HTML elements (except for <p> and <br> elements).

Using any HTML elements not listed above causes incorrect word and selection detection and makes the content-editable <div> unusable for speech recognition.

Paragraph structure in a content-editable <div>

Dragon Medical SpeechKit inserts recognition results into a <p> element. When the user says new paragraph, a new <p> element is created and the text cursor is moved into it.

Programmatically adding text or HTML elements between paragraphs is not supported; this causes incorrect word and selection detection and makes the content-editable <div> unusable for speech recognition.

Known issues

• In Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox the page must be refreshed if the microphone is unplugged and plugged in again. [DNB-4123, DNB-18532]
• In CKEditor, new lines do not work as expected. Saying new line inserts the @ character, which might be displayed in the document as §. The issue is caused by an unexpected change in CKEditor behavior. As a result, Nuance has escalated the issue to CKEditor and is awaiting resolution. [HCPLAT-2185]
• Nuance PowerMic in Citrix and VMWare environments (Nuance-hosted systems only): When opening a speech-enabled page, there can be a delay before microphone buttons are available, from a few seconds up to half a minute depending on the network connection. This only occurs in Citrix and VMWare environments; it does not occur when the user opens the page in a local browser. [CAVE-6198]
• Microphone buttons do not work in Microsoft RDS environments. [DNB-39449]

Infrastructure

Infrastructure no longer supported

• Dragon Medical SpeechKit and Dragon Medical Embedded 2021.4 applications do not work with version 3.5 servers.
• Version 3.5 client applications do not work with version 2021.3 servers.
• Nuance hosted systems only: Microphone buttons do not work in Microsoft RDS environments.

Infrastructure changes planned for the next release

• Dragon Medical SpeechKit and Dragon Medical embedded 2022.1 and higher will not work with version 2020.1 servers.
• Version 2020.1 client applications will not work with version 2022.1 servers.

System requirements

Supported browsers

Audio configuration in virtualized environments

Hardware and software requirements depend on the audio system and configuration. Supported audio systems are listed below:

* If you have configured USB redirection, the Nuance PowerMic Citrix/VMWare Extension is not required to enable button controls.

Note: Dragon Medical SpeechKit (Browser edition) does not work with the Nuance Citrix/RDS/VMware Virtual Audio Extensions; the virtualized environment's native audio channels must be used.

Supported microphones

Audio

Dragon Medical SpeechKit requires a microphone which records audio data with a bit depth of 16-bit and a sampling rate of at least 16 kHz.

Button controls

Nuance-hosted systems only: Support for button controls is listed below:

* Your application must be running in Google Chrome on a Windows operating system. The Nuance PowerMic Web Extension must be installed in Google Chrome and the Nuance PowerMic Web Adapter must be running on the operating system.

** Your application must be running in Google Chrome on a Windows operating system. The Nuance PowerMic Web Extension must be installed in Google Chrome and the Nuance PowerMic Web Adapter must be running on the operating system. The Nuance PowerMic Citrix/RDS/VMware Client Extension must be installed on the client endpoint.

System requirements for the Nuance PowerMic Virtual Extensions

Remarks

• For more information on virtualized environments, see the Docs & Guidelines folder of the Nuance virtual extensions package on the Nuance Healthcare Development Platform.
• Citrix environments: Make sure you uninstall the Nuance PowerMic Web Extension before installing the latest version. For more information, see the Nuance PowerMic Web Extension Deployment Guide.

End-of-life: third party environments

Support for third party environments is only valid as long as they are supported by the corresponding vendor and might be subject to other restrictions. Please contact Nuance Technical Support for details. For more information, see the documentation delivered with the third party product and supporting Nuance documentation.

When standard support by the vendor has stopped, Nuance will continue support if an issue is specific to the Nuance solution, within the limitations of the vendor's standard end-of-life and Nuance's policy. This means that issues that are a combination of the vendor’s component and the Nuance solution cannot be supported.

Dragon Medical SpeechKit product life cycle

Nuance provides support throughout the life cycle of one version and point release. Please note that Nuance will not perform problem analysis after the scheduled start of restricted maintenance. Dragon Medical Server versions released over three months after the dates stated here will not work with these client editions.